1) The trend seems to be cross cultural. If you examine the wealthier segments of the population in a particular country it will tend to have a lower birthrate than the poorer segments of the population.
2) The popular notion that people in underdeveloped countries have less environmental impact than the people in developed nations has little basis in reality. Third world nations practice slash and burn agrigulture. They don't practice any sort of soil conservation, and once they have exhausted the bit of soil they are working, they go off to find another bit of forest to cut down and burn. They burn inefficient fuels, with no emissions controls. They dump their garbage and sewage into the local rivers with no thought to what it may be doing down stream.
Both parents working does not seem to be one of the more important factors. The lower birthrates in North America and Europe began back when most moms stayed at home to raise the kids while daddy went off to work.
The lower birth rate also extends into rich nations today where women (especially married ones) are discouraged from having jobs, such as Saudi Arabia.
The tendancy for people in rich nations to have fewer children has been well known for a long time. There are several factors which contribute to it, some of which are:
- In an agricultural society lots of kids equals lots of hands to help with the work once they have grown up a bit.
- Poorer countries don't have things like pension plans, so mom and dad make sure that there will be lots of children to support them in their old age.
- Rich parents have better things to do with their money than spend it on children.
- Rich parents have the education, and the means by which they can practice birth control.
They are just hard to find. In an Ottawa Future Shop's Wall O' TVs there is 1 (one) 27" widescreen TV, made by Samsung. It costs about $2000 ($1300 US)
I have considered buying one, but I've never been too impressed with anything else Samsung has made.
Backwards compatability is mostly just a matter of making the discs physically the same size. Lots of DVD players out there today have dual lasers in them, one for DVDs and the second for CDs. The single laser machines tend to be the ones which can't read CD-Rs
By the time this hits the markets they might be able to forget about CD compatibility. They may have followed the 78rpm record into oblivion.:)
It is in 2061 that Clarke makes use of the idea that Jupiter could have a diamond core. I don't think that the idea was original to him, IIRC he mentions where he got it from in his 'author's notes' for the book.
He used the possibility of Europa having liquid water under its ice cap in 2010. That info came from the Voyager flybys of Jupiter.
As you mention the Guasian distribution only really applies to a fairly narrowly defined type of phenomena. One that you rarely encounter in the real world, but for a lot of cases it is close enough.
For other things there are better curves to use. The examples they gave for cases where the Gausian didn't work sounded like the Poisson distribution would have been a more appropriate one to use, and surprise, surprise, the Poisson skews in favour of less likely events.
They never said anything about who the other candidates were, how they were chosen, or who did the voting. Maybe when the old monarch died, retired or whatever the planetary aristocracy votes for which one of his possible heirs will replace him, instead of just going with the oldest male. Maybe the choice was between Amidala (or whatever her name was) and her brother whom everyone knew was an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
1) The trend seems to be cross cultural. If you examine the wealthier segments of the population in a particular country it will tend to have a lower birthrate than the poorer segments of the population.
2) The popular notion that people in underdeveloped countries have less environmental impact than the people in developed nations has little basis in reality. Third world nations practice slash and burn agrigulture. They don't practice any sort of soil conservation, and once they have exhausted the bit of soil they are working, they go off to find another bit of forest to cut down and burn. They burn inefficient fuels, with no emissions controls. They dump their garbage and sewage into the local rivers with no thought to what it may be doing down stream.
Both parents working does not seem to be one of the more important factors. The lower birthrates in North America and Europe began back when most moms stayed at home to raise the kids while daddy went off to work.
The lower birth rate also extends into rich nations today where women (especially married ones) are discouraged from having jobs, such as Saudi Arabia.
The tendancy for people in rich nations to have fewer children has been well known for a long time. There are several factors which contribute to it, some of which are:
- In an agricultural society lots of kids equals lots of hands to help with the work once they have grown up a bit.
- Poorer countries don't have things like pension plans, so mom and dad make sure that there will be lots of children to support them in their old age.
- Rich parents have better things to do with their money than spend it on children.
- Rich parents have the education, and the means by which they can practice birth control.
They are just hard to find. In an Ottawa Future Shop's Wall O' TVs there is 1 (one) 27" widescreen TV, made by Samsung. It costs about $2000 ($1300 US)
I have considered buying one, but I've never been too impressed with anything else Samsung has made.
Backwards compatability is mostly just a matter of making the discs physically the same size. Lots of DVD players out there today have dual lasers in them, one for DVDs and the second for CDs. The single laser machines tend to be the ones which can't read CD-Rs
:)
By the time this hits the markets they might be able to forget about CD compatibility. They may have followed the 78rpm record into oblivion.
It is in 2061 that Clarke makes use of the idea that Jupiter could have a diamond core. I don't think that the idea was original to him, IIRC he mentions where he got it from in his 'author's notes' for the book.
He used the possibility of Europa having liquid water under its ice cap in 2010. That info came from the Voyager flybys of Jupiter.
That's because it is written in Patentese.
It looks like English, but it's not. I'm not even sure it's a language.
As you mention the Guasian distribution only really applies to a fairly narrowly defined type of phenomena. One that you rarely encounter in the real world, but for a lot of cases it is close enough.
For other things there are better curves to use. The examples they gave for cases where the Gausian didn't work sounded like the Poisson distribution would have been a more appropriate one to use, and surprise, surprise, the Poisson skews in favour of less likely events.
The iCab browser for the Mac has built in image filtering which can be set up to kill most banner ads if you want it to.
They never said anything about who the other candidates were, how they were chosen, or who did the voting. Maybe when the old monarch died, retired or whatever the planetary aristocracy votes for which one of his possible heirs will replace him, instead of just going with the oldest male. Maybe the choice was between Amidala (or whatever her name was) and her brother whom everyone knew was an idiot.
If you can register on June 31 I'm sure they'll let you in free. (hint: check your calendar)